


a sharp-dressed man.

by outpastthemoat



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Anniversary, First Dates, Flowers, Fluff, M/M, Proposals, Schmoop, Suit Porn, Ties & Cravats
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-02
Updated: 2013-04-02
Packaged: 2017-12-07 06:38:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,791
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/745450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/outpastthemoat/pseuds/outpastthemoat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There’s nothing of the ordinary about that tie, really, except that somehow, of all the extraordinary things, it’s managed to catch Cas’s attention.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a sharp-dressed man.

I.

As ties go, it’s nothing spectacular.  Just an ordinary sort of tie: dark red silk, blazing with white stripes and a thin line of navy blue.  

Dean tries holy water first.  

He flips the tie over, careful not to douse anything other than the lining with with holy water so that the silk won’t stain, and stands back.

Nothing.

He takes a silver knife off his wall and makes a precise incision into the seam between the silk and the lining.

_Nothing._

The tie is neither haunted nor possessed.  It’s also not cursed, hexed, nor infused with Enochian sigils. 

Dean just doesn’t get it.

“Did you ever stop to consider that it’s just a normal tie?” Sam asks, weary.

“It’s  _not_ a normal tie,” Dean says dangerously, forefinger extended towards the offending object and quivering in his rage, “it’s my  _favorite_ tie.”

“So what’s wrong with it?” Sam asks.  He’s leaning against Dean’s bed, arms crossed, and he’s somehow managed to raise his eyebrows to new heights.  

“ _Nothing_ ,” Dean snarls, and paces round the bed.

There’s nothing of the ordinary about that tie, really, except that somehow, of all the extraordinary things, it’s managed to catch Cas’s attention.

Cas, who has never once deigned to comment on Dean’s clothes, Cas, who’d just as soon see Dean in jeans and plaid as anything else.  Cas, who’s hardly a slave of fashion himself; Cas, who only yesterday had leaned in so close, eyes focused on Dean’s chest, and said slowly,  _Your tie is very nice, Dean._

“You think it’s Cas who’s hexed?” Dean asks of Sam, uncertain, chewing at his lower lip.

“I think,” Sam says patiently, “that you might want to consider putting that tie on before he shows up.”

Cas  _never_ notices what Dean’s wearing: this had always been one of those things Dean had always taken for granted, blithely, like how cherry pie would always taste the best no matter which roadside diner it came from, or that Sam would always leave his dirty socks under the passenger seat in the Impala to fester for weeks.  

But now Cas  _looks_ at him, and if he’d ever looked at Dean like that before, Dean hadn’t noticed.  Maybe, just maybe, Deans been too busy looking at Cas to really notice how Cas has always looked at  _him._

Somehow the rules have changed, and now Dean doesn’t know know what to do.

“What would Cas see in a stupid old tie like this, anyway?” Dean mumbles.  And he doesn’t ask, though he desperately wants to,  _What could Cas ever see in_ me _, either?_

All Dean knows is that this is his favorite tie, and that for some reason or another Cas likes it, and that Cas will be here any minute to take him to dinner.

“What should I do?” he asks Sam hopelessly.  

Sam picks up the tie thoughtfully, then hands it to Dean.  ”I think you should tie your shoelaces, put on this tie, and remember to wear an overcoat.”  

Sam looks out the door then, and Sam covers his mouth with a hand, not-quite successfully hiding a grin   It’s half-merciless teasing, half-helpless affection.  ”And you should go get a vase and fill it with water,” he adds.

“Why’s that?” Dean grunts, smoothing the tie around his neck, taking one last look in the mirror.  

“Because your date’s at the door,” Sam says.  ”And he brought you flowers.”

 

II.

"Hold up,  _hold up_.  Sammy, what are you  _doing_?”

Sam pauses by the table, a vase in one hand, a trash bag in the other, expression incredulous.  “I’m throwing away these flowers,” he says.  

Dean snatches the vase out from Sam’s hands and holds it defensively against his chest.  “I don’t think so, buster.”

Sam looks at him, patient.  Also exasperated.  “Dean, those flowers are dying.  You need to get rid of them.”

Dean pokes at the flowers cautiously.  They  _are_ starting to look a little ragged, he’d admit; the roses are wilting and the daisies are crumbling to dust on their stems. 

But all the same, he protectively shields the vase from Sam’s waiting trash bag.  “Nope.”

Sam makes a face.  “Dean, the roses are  _rotting_.  Those flowers  _stink.”_

“There’s nothing wrong with these flowers,” Dean snaps, but Sam just  _looks_ at him.  “I’m not tossing ‘em out, Sammy.  No  _way_.”

Sam wads up the trash bag, rolling his eyes.  “They’re only flowers, Dean,” he says, irritated.  “If you want to play Martha Stewart does bomb-shelter-chic, we can go buy more.”

Dean shakes his head.  “That’s not the point,” he says, gruff, and stops there, because the point isn’t about decorating the bunker, the point is that the flowers came from _Cas_. 

The point is that whenever Dean walks by that vase and sees those sort of pathetic, half-wilted roses, he’s hit with memories: of the look on Cas’s face when he’d seen Dean, suited up and waiting by the door; of the way Cas’s eyes slid down to stare at his own feet; of the tiny half-grin Cas had aimed at the floor.

And each time Dean brushes a fingertip across a velvety petal, he remembers the way Cas had almost bashfully shoved the bouquet at him, saying, “These are for _you,_  Dean.”

And Dean remembers how every last inch of pride had melted straight out of him, remembers feeling a surge of affection so powerful it left him almost lightheaded because it was so obvious that Cas had made  _such_ an effort, and all for Dean: his hair so carefully combed to the side, that always-backwards blue tie finally twisted right side round.  

He’d  _tried,_ damnit, and it was all of a sudden completely beyond Dean’s ability to attempt to crack a joke, or poke fun at him, because the whole thing was just so fucking  _sweet_.

No one’s ever given Dean flowers before.  And he’s man enough to admit that he _liked_ it.  Except not to Sam -  _never_ to Sam.

“The point is, stay the hell away from my flowers,” he snaps at Sam, who holds his hands up in defeat.  ” _Whatever_ ,” Sam grumbles, and stalks away with air of faint disgust.  

When he’s gone Dean sneaks down the hall and into his own room, placing the vase on his nightstand.  He carefully fixes the flowers, straightening out the tangle of roses, remembering how his hand brushed against Cas’s when Dean accepted the bouquet.  

And Dean remembers above everything else how Cas had looked up from the floor, his whole expression lighting up with a beaming smile Dean had never seen on his face before, after Dean swallowed around the lump in his throat and finally managed to say, quiet and fond and almost hopelessly in love -

“Thanks, Cas. I love them.”

 _  
_III.

Dean wakes up the morning afterward with only one clear thought.  

 _Evidence_ , he thinks, panicked, _I’ve got to hide the evidence_.  

He tiptoes past Sam’s closed door and sneaks back out to the car with all the stealth of an undercover agent.

The Impala’s right where he left her, parked just outside the bunker, and he can see it now, through the windows, every incriminating affirmation of what had happened on that front seat the night before. 

There’s a black woolen overcoat, flung haphazardly over the back of the bench seat. There’s one black sock, one navy, both shoved up under the driver’s seat, and a sleek black leather dress shoe, wedged in the space between the dashboard and the windshield.  

It’s all perfectly normal; if Sam ever asked about it, Dean could explain.

There’s a red silk tie with white stripes, slung haphazardly over the rearview mirror.

Well, that might be a little harder to explain.

He remembers turning off the engine, remembers sitting in awkward silence next to Cas in the passenger seat, too far away for Dean to sling an arm casually across the the back of the seat and around his shoulders, remembers thinking, nervous and uncertain,  _Well, he paid for dinner, s_ _o does that mean he’s supposed to walk me to the door or what?_

He remembers stealing a glance at Cas, only to find him staring down at his lap and playing with the tail of his tie, remembers Cas saying stiffly, ”I had a nice time tonight, Dean.”

“Yeah,” he’d answered, drumming his fingers against the steering wheel, wanting rather desperately to figure out how to go from sitting two feet away from Cas to having him pressed up against the window and panting his name but not quite knowing how to get there.  ”We should do it again sometime.”

Dean can recall Cas saying, still staring down at his own tie, “I suppose we should say goodnight,” and he remembers answering, “Yeah, I guess so.”

Dean remembers thinking that he had  _never_ felt so utterly ridiculous in his whole fucking life, leaning as far towards Cas as he dared to go, choking over his own words while asking “Goodnight kiss?”  

He can also remember exactly how he’d felt when Cas leaned towards him, too, turning his head slightly to the side and closing his eyes as he pressed his lips gently against Dean’s, his cheek smooth against Dean’s because it would seem, of all the unlikely things, that Cas had shaved for this first date.

Somehow Dean had gone from that first soft kiss to sneaking back into the bunker minus half his clothes.  

Dean opens the Impala driver’s side door and kneels on the bench seat, groping around the floorboard for the socks, and if he can’t quite keep from smirking when he turns the wool overcoat right side out, that’s only because he can recall exactly how it got that way: remembering a pair of warm, strong hands sliding between his suit jacket and the overcoat, up his chest and over his shoulders, tugging the overcoat off.

And if he’s still smirking when when he retrieves his dress shoe from the dashboard or when he separates the navy sock from the black, well, that’s probably because he can remember, in vivid detail, hooking his ankle around Cas’s and hearing a soft squeak as the leather of his shoe rubbed against Cas’s, skimming his foot up the leg of Cas’s dress pants.

He remembers kicking off his own shoes and pushing off Cas’s, remembers the slide of Cas’s dress pants against the thigh of his own.  There had been hands sliding between his suit jacket and his dress shirt, hands wrapping around his waist and running up his sides, hands tugging the hem of his shirt out of his slacks and gliding down and around to grip the curve of his lower back.

And maybe Dean’s still grinning to himself when he finds a belt tossed aside in the backseat, but that’s only because he can remember the sound the buckle had made when Cas jerked it free from his pants, and maybe that grin grows even wider when he remembers being pressed between Cas and the driver’s side door, with Cas’s hands on his hips and Cas’s teeth on his lower lip, his ear, the curve between his shoulder and his neck. 

Dean can imagine the expression on Sam’s face, he can picture Sam uncovering the mismatched socks or finding the shoe pressed up against the windshield or catching a glimpse of the hand prints on the windows, so he hurriedly bundles each article of clothing up inside the overcoat, picks the small white buttons out from the cracks between the seats and tucks them in the pockets of his bathrobe.

He reaches for the tie hanging around the rearview mirror, and stops. 

He can remember Cas’s careful fingers sliding up around his neck as he pulled off that red striped tie, and Dean remembers asking him hoarsely, between one breathless kiss and the next, “Still like that tie, Cas?”

Those careful fingers had stopped moving.  “Yes,” Cas had said seriously.  “But I think I’ll like it better once I take it off.”

And when Dean catches a glimpse of himself in the rearview mirror, he can see more evidence: there’s a bruise on his knee from bumping against the steering wheel when Cas had pushed him up against the window, and there’s another below the collar of his shirt where Cas’s mouth had found the hollow of his throat, the edge of his jaw.

For a moment, Dean thinks wildly about whether or not he can get away with  buttoning his plaid shirts up to the collar in the middle of August, wonders frantically if Sam will think it’s suspicious if he takes to wearing turtlenecks.

But then he stops, looks at the bundle of clothes in his arms, and considers the way Cas had breathed Dean’s name in his ear, the way he’d whispered back  _Cas, Castiel._

Deanshoves the black sock inside the dress shoe, tucks the navy sock in his pocket to give back to Cas later, and heads back inside the bunker.  It’s hardly a walk of shame, after all.  

He leaves the tie hanging from the rearview mirror.

Sam can deal.

 

IV.

He shines his shoes, irons a sharp crease in his dress pants, runs a razor across each cheek until the skin is smooth to the touch.

Dean figures there’s no such thing as trying too hard, since he’s got a fairly good idea of how the end result will be appreciated,

As he buttons up his shirt, crisply starched and ironed, he imagines another set of fingers running down his chest, slowly taking him apart.  

And Sam may never let him live it down -  _When did you get to be such a sap_ _,_  he’ll say; he’ll be unbearable for weeks - but Dean puts on the same old red striped tie anyway.

He’ll slip on that black woolen overcoat, he’ll check out his reflection in the mirror for some last-minute coaching.

 _Be smooth, man_ , Dean says sternly to the man in the mirror.  He figures that this dude looks pretty damn good, even if he does say so himself.  Irresistible, even.   _And for the love of god,_  don’t fuck this up.

He plucks a rose from the vase on his nightstand, filled with the same dozen roses that have been blooming since this day last year, tucks it inside his lapel, and remembers Cas standing in the doorway of his bedroom, staring curiously at a bouquet of wilted flowers Dean hadn’t been able to toss away.

He remembers Cas saying  _You kept them_ , a note of wonder in his voice; he remembers how those wilting flowers had sprung back to life with one touch from Cas’s hand, and he carefully tucks a small box away in his right pocket.

He’ll wait by the Impala, checking his watch with every other second that ticks by, and when Cas finally shows up, he’ll say first-thing,  _Dude, we’re friggin’_ late _, we won’t get a table._   

Cas will shoot him a sideways glance that’s not quite an eye-roll and drawl, _We_ do _have a reservation, Dean_ , and his blue silk tie won’t be crooked, but Dean’ll be forced to take him by the shoulders and straighten it anyway.

He’ll keep his hand on Cas’s arm when they step inside, side-by-side, and he’ll remember how this restaurant looked a year ago, how the candlelight flickering on the table before them had become a swirl of light that danced in front of his vision; how something warm and wet and sweet had stung his eyes when Cas had said to the waitress, with that particular slight quirk to the corner of his mouth,  _This is my date._

Dean hopes that when they sit down at this table next year, Cas will say in that same oh-so-serious tone, with that same pleased smile he always tries so hard to hide,  _This is my husband._

He’ll park the Impala in front of the bunker, after dinner, after midnight comes and goes, and he’ll lean his forehead against Cas’s, and he’ll pull out that box that’s been burning a hole in his pocket all evening, and he’ll press it into Cas’s palm.  

He can see it all unfold, and maybe it even happens that way, too, though he doesn’t take into account Cas’s look of startled surprise, or how that silver ring trembles the slightest amount on Cas’s unsteady palm.

Dean doesn’t practice speaking around a catch in his voice when he finally speaks, doesn’t practice asking  _Think you’d stick around long enough to marry me?  -_ but he does.

And he doesn’t imagine Cas cupping his face with warm, tender hands, fingers soft against his smooth cheek, doesn’t imagine hearing the answer Cas gives him, whispered against his lips:  _always, forever,_ _I’m yours_ , but he will.


End file.
